Joe Tesfai, senior vice president – information technology, Atlantis The Palm, Dubai
About Joe
Revered by many in the ICT fraternity as the veteran of Hospitality information technology in the Middle East, Joe Tesfai is the Senior Vice President – Information Technology at Atlantis The Palm Dubai and Kerzner International and juggles his responsibilities with serving as a board member for du Customer Advisory Board –Hospitality, a role he fits in as glove by lending his technical expertise on matters of innovation, staying ahead of the game and improving service offerings with the growing customer base. Among many notable accolades Joe was the first Middle East representative on the Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), a global standards forum. Joe has amassed 20 years of experience, in the Hotel ICT industry with Executive and well as hands on expertise. A business visionary and a leader. He is very widely known in the industry and is respected by both his peers and the suppliers to hospitality IT. He is regularly invited to all the technology conferences, speaker panels and exhibitions in the region and abroad and has presented at several of them in the past 15 years. Joe, the IT veteran, with his reputation and stature is someone we all look up to. Joe has been a Senior Vice President of IT at Atlantis for close to six years now since well before opening.
Above and beyond the call of duty…
Joe has designed and implemented a state-of-the-art Disaster Recovery Site (DR Site), a concept of replicating all company data to an off-site location, necessitated by Atlantis The Palm location at the tip of The Palm Jumeirah crescent and proximity to the Arabian Gulf. The intensive project took a total of six months to complete. Joe and his team have ensured the precious company data is safe, accessible and ready to go as and when needed. Secondary to this Joe has procured and implemented a state of the art restaurant management system that delivers about 2,500 reservations per day to the numerous F&B outlets at Atlantis. Another feather in Joe’s hat has been the successful adoption and implementation of our intranet, Aquarius. Joe recognized the need for and developed a communication and collaborative portal where all the team members can quickly access information and data that is relevant to their professional needs. Aquarius is currently in its final stages of implementation and is on schedule to go live within the month of August. In this era of social media and marketing boom, this critical project will ultimately drive employee engagement scores higher by at least 5% per annum, because it will encourage an open two way communication at all times. Currently, Joe is in the final project stages of migrating all of the company servers in our large data centre to virtualised servers. This will help improve availability of business critical applications and IT infrastructure efficiency while reducing technical and operating costs such as electricity and cooling by 20% over the next 5 years. By consolidating servers, Joe is also reducing our long term IT capital and operational costs by approximately 10% in the data centre. From an efficiency perspective, virtualizing servers allows Joe and his team to provision servers fairly quickly as the business needs keep growing. This project will also position us for all future cloud computing initiatives, both private and public. Joe’s pursuit for perfection is demonstrated by his never-ending desire to improve the standards we offer to our guests. This is mirrored by the recent IT operation to increase wireless coverage throughout the entire resort and its vicinities, achieving an almost 100% coverage! This resulted in an industrial quality and robust infrastructure for the deployment of wireless point of sale system on the beach for the Sandance Music Festivals, Nasimi parties, gala dinners and weddings. During the Sandance events, Joe and his team install over 70 Point of Sale (POS) terminals to service all the bars and F&B outlets at Sandance each time. After the 12 hour event, all the technical equipment is broken down in a few hours and stored until the next event. As a result of this, we have witnessed a substantial increase in customer satisfaction and speedy service delivery, which can be demonstrated by increased JD Power scores in the customer service segment of the guest survey from 9.01-9.11. An eloquent and accomplished speaker, Joe is regularly invited to preside over many Technology conferences, panels and exhibitions in the region and abroad to much applause for the past 15 years.
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Testimonials for Joe
“Joe is an inspirational leader. He is well educated on the most current cutting edge technology. He fosters a growth oriented working environment and encourages his team to constantly improve through their deliverables and individual development. Joe ensures we all work as a team and deliver the best quality service that “blows away our customers”. Joe always tells the team “We Succeed as a Team, we Fail as a Team”.” Jennifer Schroeder, director of IT resort operations at Atlantis the Palm.
“I have rarely come across a C-Level executive who is so much involved with his team in achieving excellence as a business unit within an organization. I have the pleasure of knowing Joe since the year 2003 but it is at Atlantis that I got the privilege of working under his leadership. I don't have the right words to comprehend his great wealth of experience but I can definitely say that Joe creates ‘followers’ instead of just ‘subordinates’ which is a quality of a true leader.” Kamran Changezi, IT project manager at Atlantis the Palm.
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